If you do one thing tomorrow…

November 12, 2010

…make it a visit to Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour video piece on show until tomorrow evening (Saturday 13th Nov) at White Cube Mason’s Yard.

The Clock is a video installation running in parallel with real time and collaged from thousands of scenes from filmic history. Each minute, corresponding to the viewer’s own watch, is documented by a sequence of scenes showing clocks: clocks ticking silently in parlours, clocks inhabiting the backdrop of chess games, clocks checked in haste by sweaty-browed men; analogue clocks, digital clocks, cuckoo clocks; clocks on dashboards, in airports, strapped around wrists. Time-telling, which so often forms the decisive moment of a film, becomes constant and, in the end, fruitless: from the perspective of the viewer, as one scene bleeds into the next, the film-collage seems constantly to be heading somewhere but in fact the only story it tells is that of time’s relentless march.

The Clock has the power to eat time as well as describe it: its mesmerising effect and its lack of beginning or end make it difficult to break away from. But The Clock will stop tomorrow; don’t miss it.